Thursday, October 9, 2014

Lucretius continued ... scientific materialism triumphant ?

 Yes, that's what the ATP molecule really looks like!

      And one day in September 2013 I printed out a gorgeous (  internet ) greenish -yellow image of a nanographene molecule : " IBM scientists have been able to differentiate the chemical bonds in individual molecules for the first time  using a technique known as noncontact atomic force microscopy ( AFM ).  The poet  atomist Lucretius , who was rather cynical about the joy of sex, would have felt a thrill of ecstasy over this " first time ".

     When we can play with atoms and molecules as if they were marbles on a table is this not an antidote for decades of silly  QUANTUM MECHANICS MYSTICISM ?  Atoms and molecules are REAL , not abstract mental constructs. Above all  modern science is based on objective reality, on a rational  materialism in which matter, " stuff ", has certainly not disappeared as certain idealist philosophers claimed  at the very beginning of the Einstein revolution more than a century ago.  And how perceptive H.P. Lovecraft  was in perceiving  in the 1930s that  modern physics had not been reduced to metaphysics. Matter was still matter after all - wonderful and inexhaustible .  Lovecraft 's thoughts on scientific materialism were strikingly similar to those of Vladimir Lenin's in his now very obscure and wrongly ignored polemic " Materialism and Empiro- Criticism ".    
          For Lenin even the elementary electron was " inexhaustible ".  But perhaps Albert Einstein was also right about the infinite profundity of the " mind of God ".  Even hardheaded SCIENCE cannot escape the allure of the mysterious and the wonderful. Just don't confuse MIND with MATTER . Well, British philosopher Bertrand Russell might add : " never MIND " .

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Ron